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Universal Free Dictionary
Posted by
samzenpus
on Wed Dec 08, 2004 11:16 PM
from the that-is-a-big-book dept.
from the that-is-a-big-book dept.
Zdenek Broz writes "The all free dictionaries project focuses on maintaining free dictionaries (now more than 90 with more than 3,300,000 translations). We are designing a new system which will unite them all into one universal dictionary for all languages. The universal dictionary will be soon available for free under GPL."
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Engrish Module? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Engrish Module? (Score:4, Insightful)
I always apperciate the English speakers (generally Americans) who think Engrish is some way of life. I wonder what their Japanese skills are (let alone English).
Parent
Re:Engrish Module? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm sure the Japanese are just as amused by all the westerners who get tatoos of Japanese characters without getting them checked by a native speaker.
Phrase translation (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Phrase translation (Score:3, Insightful)
And then there are words that shouldn't be translated - eg. in Danish, the common word for "Download" is "Download" even though it's English. You can translate "Download" of course ("Hent ned"), but nobody in Denmark use those Danish terms, so a translation
Re:Engrish Module? (Score:5, Insightful)
Take an abstract or ambiguous word in one language (that describes a lot of them); it will have multiple related translations in english. Each of them (describing something abstract or ambiguous) will have multiple related translations in the target language. Instead of getting three or four reasonable translation candidates, you end up with several dozen - or more - most of which aren't actually a good fit for the original word.
Having dictionaries for pairs of languages are far, far preferable to going through a third language.
Parent
Does it have support for... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Does it have support for... (Score:2, Funny)
aththay ouldshay ebay.. (Score:2)
Suchetha
I already have a pretty good dictionary (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I already have a pretty good dictionary (Score:4, Interesting)
Why can't these projects work together? Seems like a lot of wheel-reinvention to me...
Parent
Re:I already have a pretty good dictionary (Score:5, Funny)
For crying out loud, the man gave you 3 direct links to dictionaries! : )
Parent
Why start a separate project? (Score:3, Interesting)
Or if they don't like the possibility of vandos, why not fork Wiktionary?
Re:Why start a separate project? (Score:3, Interesting)
GPL Dictionary (Score:4, Funny)
Re:GPL Dictionary (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:GPL Dictionary (Score:3, Funny)
KFG
Urban Dictionary (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Urban Dictionary (Score:4, Interesting)
Somewhat like translating haikus into English. The whole 5-7-5 thing is fun and challenging, I suppose (I personally hated having to write them in middle school, mainly because it was in lieu of worthwhile reading and writing), but (supposedly; I don't know Japanese) the poems in the parent language probably have a lot of import that the translated-to language may lack.
Then again, a woman at a party once told James Thurber that she'd read a French translation of his My Life and Hard Times, adding, "You know, the book is even better in French!" To which Thurber replied, "Yes---my work tends to lose something in the original."
Parent
Re-invention of the wheel? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Re-invention of the wheel? (Score:3, Insightful)
Before reading your post, I wasn't aware of the project. Taking one word at random, "dog", I was surprised by the number of missing entries in the links: canine, pup, dogs, domesticated are amongst the dozens of undefined entries. I don't know exactly how long you mean by a long time but it sure looks incomplete to me...
why GPL? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:why GPL? (Score:3)
Re:why GPL? (Score:3)
A good choice would be the GNU Free Documentation License [gnu.org] if you ask me.
Current limitations (Score:3, Insightful)
So, I wouldn't be able to translate "blue jeans" from another langauge? This really sucks, because on of my High School spanglish teachers taught us that it translated to "bluyins" in Spanish, and I've really never trusted that...
Perhaps they should wait until they have a more robust system before making these types of announcments?
Re:Current limitations (Score:3, Informative)
"Blue jeans" = "vaqueros" ("pantalones vaqueros").
Re:Current limitations (Score:4, Informative)
If you go to the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española de la Lengua [buscon.rae.es] and lookup "bluyin", you'll get a "No such word in the dictionary".
However, people from certain countries do use "bluyin" often (actually, most of us colombians call "blue jeans" "blue jeans", as in "me compre unos nuevos blue jeans", which should probably be written as "bluyins"). I remember reading that the Real Academia Española, the main authority was considering adding the word to the dictionary.
Similar things have happened with some words. For example, the word "cruasán" was recently added to the dictionary for the french word "croissant", very commonly used in spanish-speaking countries.
Alejo
Parent
phonetic transcriptions (Score:2, Interesting)
The flaw (Score:4, Informative)
But definitely, English is the opposite of a good choice.
Re:The flaw (Score:2)
No, no it isn't.
Re:The flaw (Score:3, Funny)
Esperanto - the language nobody speaks and nobody reads. What a great alternative to English!
Re:The flaw (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:The flaw (Score:3, Funny)
That does not make English better, only more popular. In comparison, was Bush a better candidate than McCain? No(far from it!), only better funded. I try to promote Esperanto because I believe in it's purpose- to be a politically neutral language that's easy to learn which can be used for a common language for the world. Esperanto is so easy, it takes very little time to learn. It doesn't stomp out the very valuable native cultures of the world, it co-exists with them. English is a stom
Re:The flaw (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason so few Americans speak foreign languages is not English, either. It's because our country is huge. If every state spoke a different language, we'd learn several languages in order to communicate. All the states use English, though, so we use English. As an example, there are more bilingual people in the American Southwest and Louisiana than in the Southeast. Why? Because there are significant minority populations which speak other languages in those areas--Spanish and French, specifically.
Regarding culture... well. Popular culture is an atrocity, but don't blame that on English, either. Shakespeare wrote in English. So did Dickens, Nabokov, Faulkner, Joyce, Bradbury, Orwell, O'Connor, and so on. You could list authors forever. They've certainly done English proud, and, in fact, they usually lose something in translation.
Please--before you knock English as a language, know what you're talking about.
Parent
Re:The flaw (Score:3, Interesting)
No it doesn't. Try speaking any language besides Esperanto among Esperantists and see how quickly they complain. The hostility against learning and practising real languages in a fruitful and convenient international setting is what has driven me away from Esperanto. When I meet with, for example, Hungarian Esperantists, I would prefer to speak Hungarian with them, since I am already relatively proficient and furt
Maybe they could improve their English design? (Score:3, Interesting)
foundation/base(engineering,housebuilding,metap h or ical)
= al Qaeda(engineering,housebuilding,metaphorical)
the loo/the sit(colloq.,sanitary)=
al Qaeda(colloq.,sanitary)
a foundation(organisation,group)=
Al Qaeda(organisation,group)
Al Qaeda(terror,name)=
Al Qaeda(terror,name)
Re:The flaw or maybe not (Score:3, Insightful)
We haven't even gone into Eubonics, or the difference between the Queen's English and A
So how about combination analysis? (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, and IMNAL - I am not a linguist.
Re:So how about combination analysis? (Score:2)
Are you sure it is not 165,000 years of human history?
Now (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Now (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Now (Score:3, Funny)
how to handle slang? (Score:4, Insightful)
For example, in quebec we use the word "char" for your car... "j'vais prenez le char ce soir", i'm going to take the car tonight.
this isn't *good* french, but it's good quebec slang. it's how people actually speak. however you wouldn't use it if you were trying to write a cover letter, but you might use it if you were writing an email to a french friend. A dictionary where you could specify "speaking" vs "writing", or even "polite" vs "friendly", some way of really characterizing the KIND of translation you want.
expressions too... sometimes expressions can be directly translated, other times you'll sound like an idiot if you just use the same phrase you would have said in english. Something that recognizes common phrases and gives corresponding expressions in another language would be incredibly useful.
I guess what I'm getting at is it's annoying when you look up a word in a translation dictionary and get like 4 or 5 choices but you have no idea what the difference between them is, or it gives you a word that actually is correct, but is so rarely used that when you say it people look at you funny.
GPL auto-corrections (Score:5, Funny)
And for a convenience, it will automatically correct your spelling as follows:
A New Kind of Flaming (Score:3, Funny)
1 usually offensive : a person affected with idiocy
2 : a foolish or stupid person
3 : Luigi Dipthong, who insulted me deeply by saying that I had completely misdrawn the control unit of my favorite processor.
There's more than this to a good dictionary (Score:5, Informative)
Glossaries like these have their uses, and I sometimes use them myself when I'm reading something and don't know a word, but good dictionaries go way beyond these. To begin with, you often can't adequately translate a word from one language with a single word from another language. It often takes at least a phrase, and sometimes there isn't any straightforwad translation and a fairly elaborate explanation is necessary. Furthermore, especially if you're going into the language you don't know well, it is often necessary to have information about the grammar of the word in order to be able to use it properly. What case does the object of a verb have to be? Which conjugation does a verb belong to?
The other major limitation of simple glossaries like these is that they don't work very well for languages with complex word-formation where the citation form is not easily obtained from the inflected forms. For instance, in English it isn't a big deal to look up a plural noun because in almost all cases you just remove s or es, so someone who reads, e.g. trapezoids doesn't need to know very much in order to guess that it is a form of trapezoid and look it up under trapezoid. However, there are languages in which words have hundreds or thousands of forms and in which it is quite difficult to figure out what to look a word up under. Creating dictionaries for such languages that can be used by inexpert users is a long-standing problem for which electronic dictionaries offer a solution, but such dictionaries won't be simple glossaries; they will be databases with morphological analyzers as front ends. I've got a paper about this problem in Athabaskan languages here [upenn.edu].
Question about dictionaries under GPL license (Score:3, Interesting)
This is a matter of practical concern. I'm overseeing a project [tinyurl.com] which is digitizing copyright-expired dictionaries of the early Germanic languages. Some of the texts on my site are in German, and I'd like to use the GPL'ed Free Dictionaries German-English word list to add a feature to my project which allows you to click a German word to get a translation for that word.
Question 1: Are there provisions of the GPL which would prevent the a GPL'ed dictionary from being intermingled in this matter with existing public domain texts?
Another problem. The texts in my project contain many rare German words relating to Iron Age technology which are unlikely to be in the Free Dictionaries list, so I'd like to add my own supplemental list of words.
Question 2: Can I assign my supplemental word list to the public domain, or do I have to license it under the GPL as a modification to the original word list?
Unheimlich (Score:3, Insightful)
I hope the English on the dictionary is better than the English on the homepage eg "There will be always the backbone description" and "will lead contributors to translate English words into other language." (mis)
American Sign Language (AMSLAN?) (Score:4, Interesting)
My idea was to create a tutorial for learning AMSLAN (American Sign Language) and to use texts from Project Gutenburg or other public domain works. One (of several) problems though is that English is rife with homographs... words that are spelled alike but have different meanings. In the case of sign language, a sign for a bow in a little girl's hair might appear extremely odd if the sign for bow of a ship popped up in automatic substitution.
Dealing with the homographs is a problem, but I see that this site's plan already takes a stab at dealing with such things (in their cat example). I'd love it if they went to the trouble of also including a bit of AMSLAN (either in animations or static pictures) as that might inspire me with some help in the solution.
Ideally, my desire is to get an automated library that could read a text (possibly read by the human sorting the homographs). And allow a user to listen to the reading and watch the text (while learning English), listen to the reading only (if hearing impaired), watch a silent sign language presentation with subtitles (to learn sign language), or watch a silent presentation through signing (if reading in silence is preferable).
Just kind of bizarre that the idea struck the same day as this article appeared, I thought.
Dictionary != language textbook (Score:3, Interesting)
I would love a free-content languages database, full of audio samples of native speakers and grammar rules, but this isn't quite there yet. I do hope something like it gets off the ground, though, because monolinguism is a terrible disease in a global community
Ethan